Alkalians (48 page)

“
Uh huh. Obviously, I now
know that Nicholas uses water magic, but what about your
father?”

“
Lightning and ice, with
some clone spells, the same as me. He emphasizes on the lightning
magic more, though.”

“
Oh, okay. And, that
Shadow Core terrorist. My dad didn’t say much about what she did
spell-wise, just that she was swift and had poisonous
bites.”

“
Uh huh, my father
mentioned that, too. But she also used clones, and a few earth and
fire spells.”

“
Really? Most Beast
Alkalians don’t use magic, right?”

“
Correct. If they do, it
could either be from family genetics or drug
enhancement.”

“
Ah, right. Just wanted to
make sure.” They both chuckle, and walk along in silence for a
moment. Coming to the door of the reserved study hall, Matt says,
“Well, here we are.”

“
Yep, so we are. Hey,
Matt, there’s something I’ve, wanted to ask you, for
awhile.”

“
Oh? What’s
that?”

“
Well, I’ll tell you, once
we’re in the study, alone.” Lyn is the one blushing this time, with
Matt looking puzzled, while she gets out a card key to open the
lock on the door. Before she can, however, the placid quiet in the
hall around them is broken by the sounds of feet pounding the
floor, and a cry of “Lyn! Lyn, there you are!” They whirl around to
see Amelia slowing to a stop before them, panting as she may have
been running for awhile. “Amelia?” Lyn asks. “What’s wrong? What is
it?”

Amelia takes a moment to catch her
breath before replying between inhales, “Irene, it’s, Irene. She’s,
preying upon lower classmen, interrupting their fights and stealing
their wins. I came looking for you, as fast as I could.”

In sudden anger, Lyn cusses, “Fire
Spirit burn that bitch! Where is she?”

“
She, she was by the
casino, the last I know of. The others didn’t engage her, not
without you being there, yet.”

“
Alright.” She turns back
to a confused Matt, saying, “Sorry, Matt, but duty calls,” and then
tells Amelia, “You stay here with Matt, to keep him company until
he decides to go back to the cabins.” Amelia nods before Lyn takes
off in a sprint down the hallway, leaving the two behind by the
door.

When they are the ones alone, Matt
blinks at Amelia, asking, “Um, what’s going on?”

Having slowed to take easier breaths
at last, Amelia explains, “Irene Goros is causing havoc among the
lower classmen yet fighting for points. She waits around while they
fight, and then at the opportune moment jumps in and defeats them,
granting neither student points for winning while she may get some,
instead. Some of us call such a thing ‘score snatching’, others
simply call it cheating.”

“
Oh. I guess that is a bad
thing, yeah. Why would she be doing that?”

“
Eh, usually for the
simple reason that it’s easier than fighting someone fairly, and
therefore an easier way to score points. She’s not the only one
who’s done it, over the years. It’s a flaw in the Royale Project’s
dynamics that no one’s been able to fix yet.”

“
Uh huh. So, are you okay,
Amelia?”

She leans her shoulder against the
wall in exhaustion, wiping back some hair from her brow while
nodding. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Phew, too bad I couldn’t be morphed
here in the college. I haven’t run this much in a long
time!”

Matt finds himself staring at the
sweat beading upon the cleavage of her chest before clearing his
throat and saying, “Ah, really? You don’t have gym class, with
Professor Serpanz?”

“
Nope, not for my senior
year. Didn’t feel like being bossed around by her anymore. As a
consequence, seems I’ve gotten a bit out of shape,
haha.”

Matt laughs, too, and replies, “Oh,
you don’t look that bad to me.” After he says it, he realizes what
it implied, and is embarrassed. “Gah, um, I’m sorry, Amelia, I
meant…”

“
No, no, you’re fine,
Matt. Compliment accepted.” She has on that warm, alluring smile of
hers as she straightens before asking, “So, what shall we do, in
the study here?”

“
Um, well, if you wouldn’t
mind, we could…” Matt hesitates with a gulp, and dares to ask, “Do
it again, maybe?”

“
I wouldn’t mind at all,
Matt. I would love to, actually.” After taking out her card key and
opening the door, Amelia flashes her smile at him, at which he
smiles in return, and he follows her into the study, the door
closing and locking behind them.

***

Later that evening, long after the sun
has set and there are no more battles going on, Irene strolls along
across the fields, a bit unsteady on her feet as she sways
left-and-right. Chuckling to herself, her face blushing and eyes
twinkling like the stars above, she is clearly drunk.

After her fun with the lower classmen,
as well as her shooting up Lyn’s gang when they tried stopping her,
was interrupted by the Wolf herself, she retreated into the casino,
staying there the rest of the day. While she had her good time
drinking and dancing, plus bullying or flirting with other
students, man or woman, it wasn’t as eventful as the one party she
had been at the previous night, where she had an especially
pleasurable encounter with another woman.

This night, though, the only thing on
Irene’s befuddled mind is getting back to her cabin for a long, hot
shower and a good night’s sleep. Whether she was alone to give
herself pleasure, or if she could convince one of her cabin mates
to join her if they were still awake, would satisfy her appetite
either way. Soon enough, she reaches the plot for the senior
cabins, spinning around in a daze for a moment as she tries finding
her own cabin.

Once she spots the cabin she believes
is hers, Irene smirks while pointing at it, mumbling out, “There
you are,” before shambling over, almost stumbling when she goes up
the few steps to the door. She tries to open the door, but it
doesn’t budge. For the next several seconds, she pulls on or shoves
into the door, muttering curses and obscenities at it under her
breath. Finally stepping back to calm down and slow her huffing
breath, she is glaring at the defiant door when she pauses, then
turns around, scanning the clearing behind her.

Amidst the patches of light provided
by the cabins and the shadows sown between them, Irene sees
nothing. Her blurry vision blending the light and darkness into a
mess, she blinks in puzzlement, sure she had just heard something,
before she then remembers another thing. Guffawing, she turns back
to the door, reaching into her pocket to take out the card key to
unlock it.

With the card in her hand,
Irene smirks at it, about to put it through the slot by the door,
when a sharp object flies into her hand, the card falling out of
her flinching fingers while she recoils with a gasp. Staring at her
hand, where a shuriken pierced it, her face goes from drunk red to
pale white as she watches the blood,
her
blood, streaming down her arm
from the wounds. Her clouded mind yet trying to make sense of it,
someone grabs her from behind, a hand clamping over her mouth to
mute her shriek while a blade is held by her neck. Trembling like a
quill in the unsteady hand of a poet, Irene’s eyes are wide open in
terror, twitching when the blade’s edge traced a thin cut across
her throat, before a voice whispers into her ear. “Now you know
what
fear
feels
like.”

Irene is sure she was going to die.
She still thinks it when she feels herself twisted around and flung
off the steps, slammed into the ground face first. In the brief
moment after impact, her injured hand smearing the dewy grass red
with blood, she realizes she can morph and defend herself. She does
so, up on her feet in a morphing flash, her left arm a rifle
jabbing around her frantically as she looks for her
assailant.

In her drunken panic, however, Irene
forgot an important thing. If she was still drunk, her battle
morph’s senses would be screwed up. Blinking in numb confusion,
lights and shadows swimming and swirling in her eyes, her body
moves slowly and erratically, and her attempts to air balance only
make a gust rush through her, almost blowing her over.

Irene still struggles to get control
over her morph when the assailant jumps on her from behind,
dragging her down to her knees as a dagger dives deep between her
shoulder and neck, green wound energy spouting out of her. Left
gasping from the strike, Irene tries flailing to free herself and
get away, her legs kicking at the slick ground, but her
incapacitation allows the foe to dot her with darkening wounds
through another dagger, stabbing or tearing into her back, side,
and chest. Once her wounds are ruby red like the bloody grass, she
feels the first dagger at last exit her torso, but only for the
second one to slice open her neck, more wound energy pouring out of
her before she demorphs.

Both her body and mind traumatized
from the assault, Irene is breathless, her hands reaching blindly
to her neck and chest, before she gets pulled back by her hair,
sprawled out beneath her assailant. At last, she sees the face of
the foe, but all she can see is a steely expression, with hair as
scarlet as blood, and some kind of leafy crown or head band over
where the eyes would be. She can’t see the eyes, but she can feel
their stare, piercing her more deeply than the daggers, and she
inhales a sharp breath, more afraid for her life than
ever.

The assailant raises the dagger in its
right hand, the dark of the leaf-like blade eclipsing the bright
moon above, casting its shadow over Irene’s face gleaming with
tears. For the longest instant, the deathly leaf hangs from its
sinister branch in the moonlight before it swiftly falls in a black
breeze.

***

Rather than her heart or head, the
blade buries itself in the soft ground next to Irene’s face, but
she still flinches as if it struck her. After staring into the
masked face of the assailant, she, either from the trauma to her
body or the distress to her mind, faints with a final breath
released out of her. As for the assailant, it stays still for a
moment before it picks up Irene’s unconscious form and sets her
back on the stairs before the cabin’s door. Briefly in the light,
the figure turns out to be feminine in frame before she ducks back
into the shadows, leaving her victim where she laid her and others
would find her later.

The only thing left behind that could
have tied her to the scene of the crime, the leaf dagger planted in
the ground, vanishes in the same instant she demorphs behind the
cabin. The leafy shuriken earlier is gone, too, erased when Irene
herself had morphed. Rose Alamence strokes back some hair from her
forehead, her green eyes the only hint of light on her in the
darkness.

Instead of her usual attire, she wears
a suit of black, skin-tight leather, completely covering her from
the neck down, and her red hair blends well with the dark to become
near unnoticeable. She has nothing else on her, except her clan’s
amulet pressed against her beneath her suit, and her badge for
collecting points on the belt around her waist. Plucking it off the
belt and checking the back of it, she sees she had made a high
score in that last encounter. Forty-four points, out of the fifty
possible.

Rose finds that convenient, having
killed two birds with one knife, and puts the badge back before
crouching and stalking off through the cabin plots, incredibly
swift and silent, while staying in the shadows so that nobody who
may be out could have known she was ever there.

***

The darkness departs as the next day
dawns, and with it the final day of the Royale Project. It is the
last chance for students to get points, and after school hours
about every individual student is out in the fields across campus,
at the pit arena in the casino, or even at the court with the rune
pillars to the northeast, to get in as many battles as they can.
All, except for Dante.

With the faint sounds and stirred dust
of fighting far behind him, he is alone in the fields, approaching
a single tree among the plain. Autumn leaves have covered the
ground around the tree, some blown farther about by the gentle
wind, and it stands as one of few places of peace and tranquility
that day on the campus.

Dante picks up two leaves, one bright
yellow and the other dark orange. Glancing at each, he puts them
into the same hand, letting them lay side-by-side. After a moment
of gazing at them, he crushes them in his grip as he thinks of his
relationship between himself and his sister.

It was between classes in the halls
that he had first gotten wind of the latest buzz, how Irene had
been found unconscious and bloodied outside her cabin that morning.
She was sent to the infirmary, where the nurses assured everyone
that she would be fine with enough rest, but it wasn’t the physical
damage to her that had him worried. He believes somewhere, somehow,
his sister had crossed the line in her scandalous behavior, and
someone had informed her of this through vicious
violence.

As Dante wonders what exactly happened
to his sister, what she may have done to deserve it, and who could
have done such a thing to her, a sneering voice cuts into the
solemn peace around him. “Hello, Dante Goros. How’s it going?” He
turns around to face a man with black sunglasses, a purple-colored
officer suit, and smooth beard-and-side-burn hair trim. He looks
cocky with his arms crossed and a big grin on his face. “Shouldn’t
you be fighting somebody for points?”